Can't Wait to Read!
Can’t Wait to Read invites a guest author to choose a few books they’re excited to crack open. Thanks to Carolyn Murnick, author of The Hot One, for this week’s picks. If you’d like to be a part of Can’t Wait to Read, email susanna@spinemagazine.co.
Polis Books, August 13. Alex Segura is one of the most generous folks in the crime writing world, and I was lucky enough to be part of his Noir at the Bar reading series last winter. His newest book puts a capper on his popular, five-part Pete Fernandez mystery series while going deep into the protagonist’s backstory and investigating the trope of the dead girl in crime fiction.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Scribner, August 20. Some of the most provocative true crime these days is being written by women who are able to take a big-picture look at our obsession with the genre and what it says about us. Rachel Monroe’s debut looks primed to push the conversation forward as she examines crime’s four most enduring archetypes — detective, victim, defender, and killer — through a combination of reportage, personal narrative, and cultural commentary.
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 15. This much-anticipated debut memoir is already getting comparisons to The Glass Castle and Liar’s Club, and, having had the privilege of reading an early copy, I can tell you it’s in a class of its own. Brodeur’s mother/daughter memoir is at once a coming-of-age story and an indelible portrait of how the flawed people we love — and who love us — shape our lives.
Horror Stories: A Memoir by Liz Phair
Random House, October 8. I’m always drawn to female rock memoirs, and this one by the feminist indie rock trailblazer looks to be as juicy and introspective as they come, with promo copy teasing anecdotes like the time Phair experienced “the beauty of childbirth while being hit up for an autograph by the anesthesiologist.” (!)
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Penguin Press, September 10. Like everyone I knew in the fall of 2017, I inhaled all the information I could get on the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, and I can’t wait to read the backstory from the reporters behind the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation at The New York Times.
Carolyn Murnick is a veteran magazine editor and the author of The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex, and Murder, recommended by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, and Elle, and named a Best Book of the Year by Buzzfeed and The New York Post. She received an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Aspen Institute and her personal essays have appeared in numerous anthologies including Lost & Found: Stories from New York. She lives in Brooklyn.